World’s First Scalable Atomic Swap Solution

To move our industry towards decentralized cryptocurrency trading, we require not only a technical proposal but also a practical solution that scales. A week ago, our Komodo community demonstrated our high trading capacity and proved that our tech is ready for broader adoption. Our solution relies on atomic-swap technology.

Relentless journey towards a practical solution

Cross-chain atomic-swap technology is not a new thing, as the concept was put forward by Tier Nolan back in 2013. The basic principle is easy to prove with a manual atomic-swap demonstration. Our lead developer, jl777, demonstrated our team’s first atomic swap in 2014.

As we worked to make atomic swaps available to the public, one thing we recognized early on was the need to make the trading as convenient as it is on any popular exchange. Thus we saw a need to integrate Electrum server infrastructure into the Komodo DEX technology. This removes the need to download a blockchain when trading.

With our lightweight atomic-swap technology in place, our community was able to begin a more rapid pace of adoption. In 2017, volunteers in our Komodo community performed 15,000 atomic swaps on our decentralized exchange, which was an important part of the movement forward.

Finally, we had to show that when on “cluster” of users trading on BarterDEX gets overcrowded, users can create a new “cluster” and continue trading. Our demonstration this last weekend took one trading cluster to maximum trading capacity, allowing us to see its limitations and to iron out any issues in the code.

The technology to branch out each cluster individually is now in place, and we have used the results of maxing out one cluster to optimize the backend code for each cluster. As of today, we can say without equivocation that the full backend package of Komodo is online. What’s even better, is that we tested everything adequately under the eyes of everyone. Our atomic swap technology allows users to safely attempt to swap with others for blockchain products on completely separate blockchain.

Public Stresstest: total of 13900 atomic swaps

The test proves that BarterDEX is capable of handling millions of fiat-equivalent USD value in 24-hr transaction volume. We saw over 2000 transactions in 7 hours, which means we were sustaining over five swaps per minute, and over 20 of them were happening in parallel.

Swaps

KMD volume

BEER volume

avg Price

avg Basevolume

avg Relvolume

netid

1508

1183

2107

3.5378

0.7843

1.3969

0

1787

1031

1545

2.0311

0.5770

0.8646

1

1825

1193

1779

1.9326

0.6538

0.9749

2

1767

1061

1606

3.4691

0.6003

0.9090

3

1434

1114

1688

1.4912

0.7769

1.1772

4

1471

857

1215

1.5788

0.5824

0.8258

5

1445

829

1130

1.5395

0.5736

0.7823

6

1235

656

910

1.7540

0.5316

0.7369

7

1428

716

973

1.3752

0.5017

0.6811

8

Total

1309

8641

12953

2.0788

0.6202

0.9276

including outliers

13974

8721

26410

The results were achieved with just ten market maker nodes. The system can be further scaled up by increasing the number of nodes and something called ’netID’s.’ A new netID is born when a new group of nodes forms an additional trading layer. One netID can only have a limited number of nodes, and so it is necessary to make new ones if all the existing ones become too crowded.

How Our Community Traded BEER to KMD

The whole test was public, and anyone was able to attend. Each participant received ’BEER’ tokens that they then swapped for actual KMD. This way every participant had the incentive to swap as much as they could during the test.

BEER, PIZZA, and KMD on Agama Wallet

The test began when our technical team submitted live buy orders for BEER. Each buy order we placed was tiny, so it was not possible to change all BEER into KMD instantly. On average it took about 4 minutes for each swap to complete.

Stress test ended when we ran out of BEER.

You can do a swap too, today

Now in 2018, it is possible for anyone to start trading atomically, and that is what our community proved during the tests. Furthermore, during the past months, we have witnessed how our volumes have been steadily growing.

Atomic swaps are done through a BarterDEX testing GUI.

The next and final step is to make the trading as convenient as on any normal exchange. That being said, we do have a GUI version for testing, and with a little bit of determination, anyone could do it.

Where else could you try to do an actual atomic swap? Come and join our Slack to be among of the first ones to do so!